Our CloudFridge project in Make magazine

Go grab the latest issue of Make Magazine! In addition to it having a wonderful run down of many of the different types of Arduino or Arduino-like boards out there, it also includes a project Mike & Tod created: CloudFridge.

CloudFridge makes your fridge door Internet-connected, creating a real-time graph of when and how long the door is open. Applications of this data could range from a simple fridge energy monitor to diet planning. But mostly it’s a demonstration of just how quickly one can go from idea to working implementation with tools such as Arduino, BlinkM, and Xively: we went from idea to working implementation in an afternoon.

We originally created this article over a year ago and its showing its age a bit (today the Arduino Yun would be a great alternative to what we used), but the techniques are still very valid. Thanks to the Make magazine staff for helping update the article in the light of the Pachube->Xively transition. And check out this awesome cute title graphic they made for the article.

Having fun working on the Cloudfridge. Decided to try to do it with the Yun. Has anyone done this and is willing to share their sketch? I’m planning to try to merge the XivelyClient example into the CloudFridge sketch but am a little rusty…thought I’d check before digging in. Thanks

Hi Chris,
This is a great idea. The Yun would be a better solution I think than the Arduino + Ethernet shield we presented. The Yun works out-of-the-box with the Temboo service, and they offer a gateway to Xively. I bet that would be the quickest route.

blink(1), the USB RGB LED

blink(1) is a super status light. It fits into any USB port on almost every type of computer: Mac, Linux, Windows, Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone, WRT router, etc. No drivers needed and APIs in about every language you could want. And it's all open source.
Buy one now!